Our new @TheBTI report, led by @vijramachandran, contends that the World Bank & Multilateral Development Banks have misallocated #ClimateFinance in low & middle-income countries, with too much emphasis on climate change mitigation and not enough on climate adaptation. (In 2022, for example, only 37% of $60.9B spent went to adaptation, while 63% went to mitigation). Check out the full report at: thebreakthrough.org/issues/e… 🌍 #COP29 #GlobalDev The report has many important insights and recommendations, but I’ll highlight three that I was involved in. 1: Climate Change's impact on climate hazards is just one subset of the broader issue. The risk of adverse consequences from weather and climate phenomena can be thought of as the interaction of three components: hazards (physical weather and climate phenomena such as wildfires, extreme temperatures, extreme precipitation, droughts, and hurricanes); exposure (people or assets in the path of hazards); and vulnerability (the propensity of people or assets to be adversely affected by the hazard). Much of the discussion on climate change is focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent further increases in certain hazards in the long term. However, an inordinate focus on hazard reduction without an attendant focus on exposure and vulnerability might increase the risk of overall negative climate impacts because the successes in hazard reduction could be offset by forgone progress on reduced vulnerability. Therefore, to reduce overall climate impact risk, it is important not to focus exclusively on reducing hazards via greenhouse gas mitigation when exposure and vulnerability are often much bigger and more direct levers that can be pulled. 2: When investing in climate adaptation, don't get unnecessarily distracted by climate change; rather, focus on facilitating continued increases in resilience against the climate generally. There are broad areas that we know make society more resilient to climate extremes that result from both climate and climate change. For example, investments in flood management, demi-lunes and other rainwater harvesting techniques for land restoration, nutrient-dense crops, seed diversity including hybrid and native seeds, and reliable weather forecasting, can help farmers adapt to climate. The baseline impact of a weather or climate hazard cannot be left out of decisions on how best to adapt to climate, and a projected long-term change in a hazard should not necessarily make it a priority in adaptation investment. The figure below illustrates this point. Consider Hazard A, which is expected to become more destructive in the future, and Hazard B, which is not expected to become more damaging but has a larger current impact. Adaptation investment for Hazard A completely negates its enhanced destructiveness in the future, which makes it appear to be a successful investment for climate change adaptation. However, If we make an adaptation investment for Hazard A at the expense of Hazard B (simply because Hazard A is projected to change and Hazard B is projected to remain constant) we will be making a mistake. The return on investment for Hazard B ($5 billion per year) is larger than it is for Hazard A ($2 billion per year). The point is that we should prioritize the adaptation actions that have the highest return on investment regardless of whether they are true climate change adaptations as opposed to actions that generally fortify systems against the climate. 3: Multilateral Development Banks should explicitly recognize and prioritize the role of abundant energy in adapting to climate. All countries require a minimum level of continuous power to cope with extreme weather and climate events. Access to affordable, reliable energy is central to the proper functioning of farms, businesses, schools, and hospitals and for the operation of early warning systems in extreme weather or climate events. The World Bank has committed to providing electricity access to 300 million people in Africa by 2030. However, the Multilateral Development Banks should recognize the Modern Energy Minimum, which is defined as 1,000 kilowatt hours per person per year, and critically, they should not allow mitigation measures to undermine the achievement of sufficient and affordable energy in low- and lower-middle-income countries.